basic three categories (Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness) are not only inside the perceivers mind, but also in the nature perceived - Peirce

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        <b>Peirce's triadic philosophy (S. Brier)</b>
      
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        Peirce's develop‧ment of his system gave rise to a whole system of thought and logic. To 
        understand semiosis Peirce constructed a triadic philosophy with qualia as firstness, 
        resistance or constraints as secondness and habit formation for instance in cognition 
        through signs as thirdness. The triadic cat‧egories went right through the whole system 
        and became the basic categories of knowing. Peirce simply calls them firstness, secondness 
        and thirdness. In the following quotation Peirce gives a short description of his triadic 
        categories: 
      
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        "Actuality is something 
      
      
        <i>brute</i>
      
      
        . There is no reason in it. For instance putting your shoul‧der against a door and trying 
        to force it open against an unseen, silent and unknown re‧sistan‧ce. We have a two-sided 
        conscious‧ness of effort and resistance, which seems to me to come tolerably near to pure 
        sense of actuality. On the whole, I think we have here a mode of being of one thing which 
        consists in how a second object is. I call this Secondness. Besides this, there are two 
        modes of being that I call Fir‧st‧ness and Thirdness. 
      
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        First‧ness is the mode of being which consists in its sub‧j‧ect's being positi‧vely such 
        as it is regard‧less of aught else. That can only be a pos‧sibi‧lity. For as long as 
        things do not act upon one anot‧her there is no sense or mean‧ing in saying that they have 
        any being, unless it be that they are such in themsel‧ves that they may perhaps come into 
        re‧lation with others. The mode of being a 
      
      
        <i>redness</i>
      
      
        , before anything in the universe was yet red, was neverthe‧less a positive quali‧tative 
        possibil‧ity. And red‧ness in itself, even if it be embodied, is some‧thing posi‧tive and 
      
      
        <i>sui ge‧neris</i>
      
      
        .... 
      
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        Now for Thirdness. Five minutes of our waking life will hardly pass without our making 
        some kind of prediction; and in the majority of cases these predic‧tions are fulfilled in 
        the event. Yet a prediction is essentially of a general nature, and cannot ever be 
        completely fulfil‧led. To say that a prediction has a tendency to be fulfilled, is to say 
        that the future events are in a measure really governed by law.... This mode of being that 
      
      
        <i>consists</i>
      
      
         ... in the fact that future facts of Secondness will take on a deter‧minate character, I 
        call Thirdness".
      
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        (Peirce in Buchler 1955 p. 76 )
      
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        <i>Firstness </i>
      
      
        is among other things a monadic characte‧ristic or predicate: sense qualities, simple 
        forms and feelings, the modus of possi‧bilities, that which exists without reference to 
        any other thing and pure quality. Firstness is perception and it is vague because it does 
        not in itself stand in any relation to anything else. Abduction is firstness.
      
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        <i>Secondness </i>
      
      
        is a dyadic quality which something has in its relation to something else, but 
        inde‧pendent of some third thing. Secondness is experience (of events). This is the 
        cat‧egory for the characteristics of the objects which makes it possible to know them and 
        identify them inde‧pendent of concepts by point‧ing and saying this/that. For example 
        indexes are signs that stand for things without de‧scrib‧ing them. Secondness is the 
        subject in logic. It is resis‧tance, breaks, separateness, quantity. Where firstness is 
        possibility, second‧ness is necessity such as local causality. Deduction is secondness.
      
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        <i>Thirdness </i>
      
      
        is the triadic quality, which only that has which is as it is, because it brings 
        some‧thing second and third in relation to each other. This is the category of generality 
        and under-standability, rationality, lawfulness, and therefore the category of the sign 
        and of logical inference. From a human point of view firstness is feeling and secondness 
        experi‧ence. Thirdness is the generation of some kind of biological, cultural or 
        linguistic habit which elevates us above firstness' universe of possibi‧lities and 
        secondness' numberless incidents. Thirdness puts quality and quantity together in a 
        relation parallel to logical inference as is done in science. Induction is thirdness.
      
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        In most of our lives we only get to firstness and secondness through thirdness. But 
        non-conceptual direct experience is possible but rare. What living systems make can be 
        called 
      
      
        <i>semiospheres.</i>
      
      
         They live in a sphere of signification of their own making through the intercorrelation 
        of Firstness (Representamen), Secondness (Object) and Thirdness (Interpretant) to semiosis 
        creating an informational world or reality.
      
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